Warming up to a career in climate change

WHEN Marisa Goulden arrived in an isolated village on the shores of Lake Kyoga in Uganda, it proved tricky to explain to its inhabitants what she was doing there. “I was the first westerner to stay in the village. They associated white people with development projects,” she says. “They were welcoming, but they had no understanding of global, human-induced climate change.”

Goulden’s goal was to find out how the locals coped with drought and floods. Communities living by lakes in east Africa are dependent on natural resources, and have always been forced to live with severe climatic variability. Goulden wanted to see whether their ways of adapting could be useful elsewhere as climate extremes become greater.

Instead, she found the people were much more vulnerable than she had expected and were not adapting well, even to the vagaries of the present climate. If there is a severe flood, the whole local economy suffers. The best off are families with strong economic links to the outside world, she found. “This means that road infrastructure, social networks and trade links are going to be an important part of the response to climate change in developing countries,” she says.

Goulden is a social scientist, so it may seem surprising that she works on climate change. In fact, she’s just one of a growing band of researchers from a number of fields whose work centres on it. What used to be the realm of physical scientists and mathematicians now has the attention of biologists, geologists, geographers, computer scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, engineers and more. “Name any discipline, and I could carve out an interesting research opportunity in climate change for you,” says Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. “It is one of the great challenges of our time, and the UK is leading the world in conducting wider political debate about what it means.”

As a result, climate change has become a major research priority in the UK. Researchers are working hard on three fronts – prediction, mitigation and adaptation. In other words, how the climate is going to change, how we might prevent this and what we should do if it does. Prediction involves building and running simulations of the global system using increasingly powerful computers. The other two areas, which could jointly be called “what are we going to do about it?”, concern the societal implications of the science. And it is there in particular that the research has drawn in so many new disciplines.

Broader and deeper

Climate science was a relatively narrow field until recently. Keith Shine, professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, traces the start of the modern era to a series of papers published in the 1960s by Syukuro Manabe at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. Manabe developed the first mathematical models of the atmosphere to predict the effects of adding carbon dioxide.

Around this time, however, researchers were working in isolation, and there were as many warning of an impending ice age as there were that the Earth is warming, Shine says. “The early climate models were just atmospheric, derived from weather forecasting models,” says Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter. “Then the oceans were included, initially just as immobile slabs of water that absorbed and reflected heat.” Things began to change in the late 1980s, as researchers started to understand more about how oceans affected climate, and oceanography became a crucial part of climate science. “We now have a lot of models of the oceans,” says Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, “but we still need more field observations. We only have very short records of what the oceans have been doing.”

In the 1990s, another discipline came on board&colon; biological sciences. At the Hadley Centre, the Met Office’s research centre on climate change, Cox was involved with incorporating land surface into the climate models. “Initially our models were built in a rather reductionist way,” he says. “They did not use ecological knowledge, like how plants respond to changes in carbon dioxide levels, or how decomposition rates change.” This was where biological sciences came in. Pete Falloon, also at the Hadley Centre, who studies how carbon moves between soil and the atmosphere, says biologists like him are now common. “In the past, you needed maths or physics to work here,” he says. “Now there are more natural scientists.”

This century has brought a new wave of social scientists and engineers. The Tyndall Centre – a partnership between six universities set up in 2000 – has played a key role (see “Where it’s at”). The centre’s remit is to connect different realms of knowledge such as economics, psychology and engineering with natural sciences, to gain insights into what climate change means for society. Tyndall researchers were responsible for some of the main conclusions of the Treasury’s Stern Review on the economic impacts of climate change, published last October.

Jacks of all trades

Today, many climate scientists are truly interdisciplinary, which can be a challenge. To begin with, there’s the jargon. “The same word can mean completely different things in different disciplines,” says Shine. Take the term “high resolution”. To a global climate modeller, resolving every 50 kilometres is very fine scale, but to a soil scientist, that is ridiculously low resolution.

“You have to be brave to be interdisciplinary,” says Brenda Boardman of the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, whose career has spanned economics and sociology. “You will never know as much as the experts you are speaking to, so you have to be prepared to ask the silly question.”

“You will never know as much as the experts, so be prepared to ask the silly question”

Some scientists experience another problem, especially at the beginning of their careers. “A mix of social and natural science makes it very difficult to slot into a university department, where you’re expected to teach within a discipline,” says Goulden. Her degree is in geophysics and her PhD combined social science with basic climate modelling.

Not only is it difficult to find the right department, if you don’t fit into the traditional structure of science, it can also be difficult to win funding. “Research assessment favours disciplinary academics,” says Hulme. The problem is that researchers tend to be judged by their top four publications, and the assessment panels are divided into disciplines. “I wouldn’t want my research judged solely by social or natural scientists,” Hulme says, “but I have to be referred to one panel or another.”

According to Hulme, many climate scientists do not get the credit they deserve for research activities outside traditional paper publication. Sometimes called “knowledge transfer”, this includes meetings with ministers and the like. “The Tyndall Centre has had a huge influence on the policy debate,” he says, “but it’s almost impossible to get recognition for that.”

Boardman agrees that advising on policy is a thankless task. She should know – her team is looking at ways to reduce energy demand in the domestic housing sector. Boardman says you can never be sure that politicians are getting the message. “Sending a report to a civil servant is like throwing a ball over a brick wall. It doesn’t come back and you don’t know if anybody has caught it.”

However, Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the largest funder of UK climate change research, says that extra activities such as policy advice are taken into account with funding applications. And the good news is that right now there is plenty of cash in the pot (see Graphic). “It’s a job-finders’ market,” says Cox. “The subject is high profile, so there is plenty of resource going into research.”

Tim Jupp, a young mathematician at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, is one beneficiary of this. “If I’m honest, I’ve come to climate change because that’s where the money is,” he says. Of course, that’s not the only reason. Jupp is fascinated by his research area, incorporating measurements of the amount of water vapour given off by vegetation and carbon from forest fires into climate models. “Any systems with feedback are interesting mathematically,” he says.

For most researchers, it is no longer a question of whether there will be climate change, but of exactly what should be done about it. “The consensus amongst scientists is extraordinary,” says Cox. And British climate change research has become a formidable, multi-faceted force. Researchers pursuing a career in this area have the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of science, and also shape society. “The agenda is still expanding so fast,” Cox says. “It’s tremendously exciting.”

Case study

MIKE WALKDEN trained as a civil engineer at the University of Plymouth. In his PhD he designed breakwaters to withstand waves, and later worked on computer models of coastal erosion. Now Walkden studies the effects of sea level rise on coasts (see Diagram).

What led you to work on climate change?

I started by modelling coastal processes with Jim Hall at the University of Bristol. Engineering models tend to operate at small scales, over one wave or a single storm, but I was asked to develop a model of cliff erosion that could represent development over decades and incorporate human interventions like groynes and additions of sand. By chance, the Tyndall Centre was interested in the same stretch of the Norfolk coast we had modelled, so we got cash from them to dig into the impact of climate change.

What are you working on now?

The Tyndall Centre’s “coastal simulator”, which is a complex model showing how climate change could change the coastline over the next century. It brings together information from a variety of sources. The Hadley Centre gives us climate data, from which the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool generates future waves; the University of Manchester predicts how the waves will arrive at the coast; I and my colleagues model coastal erosion and flood risk over the next century; then we pass our results to researchers at the University of Southampton and the University of East Anglia, who assess the impact on local communities and wildlife.

What’s the next step?

We’re trying to use virtual reality so people can see the predictions and their uncertainty easily without the need for technical graphs. Sea level rise creates a clear hazard for coastal communities and planners want to be told what will happen in the future, not a range of possibilities.

Case study

CLARE GOODESS is a veteran climate researcher. She has been working at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia for 25 years and is now a senior research associate. In the 1980s she helped assemble the first global temperature record of the last hundred years.

What was it like being among the first to recognise anthropogenic climate change?

The work was quite tedious really. I spent a lot of time in the Met Office archives. But the end product was very influential in relation to the growing recognition of global warming. I remember the disbelief from conference audiences when I presented the warming trend and tentatively suggested it might be related to human activity. There was one particularly uncomfortable meeting of the Royal Meteorological Society in London where there was fierce criticism of our work.

What are you working on now?

I take large-scale climate models and use statistics to extract information on specific sites so it can be used by people in industry. I’m a bridge between the climate modelling community and users of its findings. It’s a challenging communication issue, especially as the models get more complex.

Is it difficult being a senior female scientist?

At my level, I look around and wonder where the women are. It’s an added pressure, having to ensure you’re taken seriously when you are the only woman in the room. People expect you to be a role model. I would advise young women who want to work on climate change to develop strong technical expertise as early as possible.

WHAT EDUCATION DO YOU NEED?

Training in a traditional discipline is best. Maths and physics are good for numerical modelling. Biology and economics are also excellent, but competition for jobs on the biological side is more intense. Geographers are well placed to grasp the breadth of the climate change issue, as are earth scientists. Follow it with an interdisciplinary postgraduate course like meteorology, oceanography or environmental change and management.

Where it’s at

CLIMATE change researchers are found in many UK universities. Most research is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), with some money from the European Commission and other research councils. The Environment Agency also spends several hundred thousand pounds a year on climate change research. These are the main institutions&colon;

THE TYNDALL CENTRE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH, NORWICH

Named after the scientist who first measured the absorption of thermal radiation by carbon dioxide, this national centre for climate change research has joint funding from three research councils, and is sited in six partner universities. It employs the equivalent of 56 full-time scientists. www.tyndall.ac.uk

THE HADLEY CENTRE, EXETER

Set up in 1990, this centre now forms the top floor of the Met Office building in Exeter and is funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to study climate change and its implications. It employs around 150 scientists. www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre

NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHY CENTRE, SOUTHAMPTON

A joint venture between the University of Southampton and NERC, which provides a national focus for UK oceanography. Employs 520 scientists. www.noc.soton.ac.uk

BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY

A NERC-funded institute with a base in Cambridge and five Antarctic research stations, with a strong focus on climate change. It employs between 150 and 200 scientists. www.antarctica.ac.uk

THE CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY AND HYDROLOGY

A NERC-funded centre for land and freshwater environment sciences. Climate change is a cross-cutting theme, with major research programmes on the ecological impacts and effects of vegetation on the climate system. It is currently being restructured, downsizing to four sites – Wallingford, Lancaster, Edinburgh and Bangor, with 400 scientists. www.ceh.ac.uk

On the record

Why work in climate change?

“Working on climate change is such a buzz. Every month there’s a new extreme somewhere.”

John Turner, British Antarctic Survey

“It’s really exciting to take a physical science and apply it to something of immediate relevance to mankind.”

Keith Shine, professor of meteorology, University of Reading

“Climate change science is an urgent search for solutions to the biggest global threat to the human race. Sure beats selling insurance.”